All history as reconstruction of the past is of course myth


Racist Humor or Just Racism at the New Yorker?
July 21, 2008, 1:50 pm
Filed under: World Affairs | Tags:

Racist Humor or Just Racism at the New Yorker?

Remnick’s Latest Blunder

By ISHMAEL REED

Undoubtedly, David Remnick is a good editor, but he sometimes exercises poor judgement. He says that we met while I taught at the University of California at Berkeley. I don’t remember. I first noticed him when he wrote a review of one of my novels, ”The Terrible Twos,” for The Washington Post. In it, he cited a typo that appeared in the uncorrected galleys to condemn the book.

For his book about Muhammad Ali, ”The King of the World, “he received the now defunct Don Imus American Book Award. Rather than reject the prize as a protest against Don Imus’ history of Anti-Semitic tirades, he accepted the award, and when he appeared on the Imus show, the host and his co-horts ridiculed him. Ironically,  The New Yorker is a magazine that denounced Minister Louis Farrakhan as an anti-Semite. Maestro Michael Morgan of the Oakland Symphony, who conducted violinist Farrakhan in a performance of one of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto – he said that he wanted to make up in music what he could not say in words- told me that Farrakhan cooperates with local Rabbis to keep their neighborhood crime free, and for years has had a Jewish woman give him violin lessons. Maybe the minister should establish a book award and give one to Remnick.

When Jane Mayer, one of Remnick’s writers, appeared on C-Span, I asked her about the propriety of Remnick taking $100, 00 from Imus. She responded by saying that Remnick wasn’t a racist. She seemed really agitated. Of course, I hadn’t called him that.

Things have improved slightly for African-American writers under Remnick’s editorship. I’ve seen poems by Yusef Komunyaka and Cornelius Eady published there. A poem of mine was published.

A short story by William Melvin Kelley has appeared and they have a regular black contributor, Hilton Als. There have also been features about African-American artists including Sonny Rollins and Kara Walker, but, like other progressive and liberal publications, some of which, like Rolling Stone and The Nation, have endorsed Barack Obama, ninety five percent of The New Yorker writers are white males. In fact, Fox News has more black contributors than The New Yorker, NPR, Rolling Stone and The Nation, which still lists me as a  contributor even though I haven’t had anything published there in years and have never been invited on one of their yacht cruises.

Certainly, conditions aren’t as bad for African-American men and black and white women at The New Yorker as they were in the old days when Harold Ross was at the helm. He was so racist that, according to the book, “Genius In Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker” by ThomasKunkel, Ross wouldn’t even hire blacks as messengers.

When I was in elementary school, my grandmother, a domestic, used to bring home copies of The New Yorker from the homes where she was employed. I remember the cartoons depicting blacks as cannibals, with bones in their noses boiling whites in a cauldron, the kind of image that New Yorker cartoonist, Robert Crumb, has re introduced with his Angelfood McSpade, his bone-in-the-nose cartoon black woman who goes about licking toilets and saying things like “ Ah gots de biggests tits in town, “the kind of line that Richard Price and David Simon put into the mouths of their black characters and the image of Africa that we still get on CNN and he Sunday New York Times Magazine.

But now Remnick finds himself embroiled in a controversy and though the majority of those polled, black and white, found the cartoon about the Obamas offensive, he has plenty of defenders including a writer for New York magazine, which regularly features blacks as criminals and thugs, members of the Imus Alumni, and Hitler fan Pat Buchanan and even Joan Walsh of Salon. com. Some of the critics of the cartoon, including the Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel justify it’s appearance on First Amendment grounds. The controversy has been discussed on cable for days with the usual panels, mostly white, and a few Colored Mind Doubles like Bush supporter, Rev. Eugene Rivers, whose background hasn’t been vetted by MSNBC; they should read Boston Magazine.

This is the man that MSNBC uses to slime black leaders like Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton. The Bush adminstration and  the media has attempted to impose Rivers upon blacks as a  leader without success.

Most of the talking heads don’t know the difference between a caricature, a satire, a lampoon and a parody.

Remnick, says that The New Yorker cartoon about Barack Obama as a Muslim president and Michelle as his Black Power spouse was meant to ridicule the unfounded rumors about the candidate, yet the intention of the cartoonist, Barry Blitt, is unclear.

Using Remnick’s argument, suppose that In order to combat the ancient slander that the Jews kidnapped Christian children for ritualistic purposes, The New Yorker did a cartoon of Sen. Joseph Lieberman attired in streimel, black clothes and shawl and his wife Hadassah attired in wig and long black skirt draining the blood of Christian child to be used for Passover. Do you suppose that there’d be arguments about First Amendment rights were such a cartoon to appear?

And what about Remnick’s defenders, who argue that The New Yorker has a history of printing bold and in-your-face cartoons.

When Henry Louis Gates Jr. edited a 1996 black issue of The New Yorker, some black cartoonists said they were censored by Tina Brown, the then editor.

The Village Voice printed a letter from famed black cartoonist Barbara Brandon in which she complained about The New Yorker magazine’s buying cartoons from 8 black cartoonists but not using them. The Voice printed Ms. Brandon’s rejected cartoon. It showed a white woman angrily reproaching a black woman. She says to a black woman,”Why don’t you get off your butt and get a job.” In the next panel the black woman is sitting at a desk and the white woman says,”Hey, wait a minute. I wanted that job.” This cartoon was turned down by Tina Brown for being”more difficult for people to handle than had been anticipated.” Ms. Brandon  answered that being a black cartoonist who made The New Yorker“nervous” was better than being published in The New Yorker.

As for the claim that The New Yorker has a tradition of printing outrageous political cartoons, Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize- winning cartoonist, who defended the Obama cartoon, said that he quit The New Yorker in February 2003 because, “The New Yorker was marching to the same beat as The New York Times. “He said he had trouble getting his anti-Bush cartoons printed there.

While Gates was hired by former editor Tina Brown to denounce Minister Louis Farrakhan, Robert Crumb, a cartoonist whose cartoons have been considered so racist that they have earned a spot at the Jim Crow Museum online at Ferris State U., and at least one was reprinted by a Neo-Nazi magazine, according to Art Speigelman in an interview with Gary Groth, is a regular New Yorker cartoonist. He’s found a home there. Even did a cover. One of his cartoons shows a black power dictator murdering the white president while the white first lady fellates him. The title of the cartoon is “When The Niggers Take Over America.”Take a look at it. Google  Robert Crumb “When The Niggers Take Over America. ”It’s accompanied by a cartoon entitled “When The Goddam Jews Take Over America. “

Finally, Harold Ross, The New Yorker’s founder, said that”Coons are either funny or dangerous,” according to”Here at the New Yorker” by Brendan Gill.

I guess the Obama cartoon was supposed to be funny.

Ishmael Reed is the editor of Konch. His new book,”Mixing It Up, Taking On The Media Bullies,” was published this month by De Capo.

3 Comments


A Blackmail - Obama & The New Yorker Cartoon Cover
July 15, 2008, 10:32 am
Filed under: World Affairs | Tags:

Apparently, Obama did not convince the hardcore Zionists (AIPAC) in spite of promising Israel an undivided Jerusalem and do everything to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but here is the problem: Obama did not rule out in his speech that Jerusalem should be part of Palestinian territory.

From JP Jun 6, 2008 : Obama clarifies united J’lem comment:

But a campaign adviser clarified Thursday that Obama believes

“Jerusalem is a final status issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties” as part of “an agreement that they both can live with.”

“Two principles should apply to any outcome,” which the adviser gave as: “Jerusalem remains Israel’s capital and it’s not going to be divided by barbed wire and checkpoints as it was in 1948-1967.”

Many on the right of the political spectrum among America’s Jews welcomed Obama’s remarks at AIPAC, but the clarification of his position left several cold.

“The Orthodox Union is extremely disappointed in this revision of Senator Obama’s important statement about Jerusalem,” said Nathan Diament, director of public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations. He had sent out a release Wednesday applauding Obama’s Jerusalem remarks in front of AIPAC.

“In the current context, everyone understands that saying ‘Jerusalem… must remain undivided’ means that the holy city must remain unified under Israeli rule, as it has been since 1967,” Diament explained.

“If Senator Obama intended his remarks at AIPAC to be understood in this way, he said nothing that would reasonably lead to such a different interpretation.”

Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America and another Jewish activist who had originally lauded Obama’s statement, now called the candidate’s words “troubling.”

“It means he used the term inappropriately, possibly to mislead strong supporters of Israel that he supports something he doesn’t really believe,” Klein charged.

But congressman Robert Wexler, a Democrat from Florida with ties to the Jewish community and a long-time supporter of Obama, rejected the idea that the Illinois senator had been misleading with his comments.

“Everyone knows that Jerusalem is a final status issue. That is not a secret to anyone. Senator Obama says emphatically that should the Israelis and the Palestinians negotiate [an agreement], he will respect their conclusions and that he will not dictate a particular resolution.”

It seems that the Jewish voters are split in two camps. From the leading article in this month’s issue and where you find the cartoon (Making It, by Ryan Lizza):

In truth, Rush had little to worry about; Obama was already on a different political path. Like every other Democratic legislator who entered the inner sanctum, Obama began working on his “ideal map.” Corrigan remembers two things about the district that he and Obama drew. First, it retained Obama’s Hyde Park base—he had managed to beat Rush in Hyde Park—then swooped upward along the lakefront and toward downtown. By the end of the final redistricting process, his new district bore little resemblance to his old one. Rather than jutting far to the west, like a long thin dagger, into a swath of poor black neighborhoods of bungalow homes, Obama’s map now shot north, encompassing about half of the Loop, whose southern portion was beginning to be transformed by developers like Tony Rezko, and stretched far up Michigan Avenue and into the Gold Coast, covering much of the city’s economic heart, its main retail thoroughfares, and its finest museums, parks, skyscrapers, and lakefront apartment buildings. African-Americans still were a majority, and the map contained some of the poorest sections of Chicago, but Obama’s new district was wealthier, whiter, more Jewish, less blue-collar, and better educated. It also included one of the highest concentrations of Republicans in Chicago.

“It was a radical change,” Corrigan said. The new district was a natural fit for the candidate that Obama was in the process of becoming. “He saw that when we were doing fund-raisers in the Rush campaign his appeal to, quite frankly, young white professionals was dramatic.”

Many of Obama’s campaign contributions are Jewish, and they have another agenda than hardcore Zionists, and to make it clear once again, the Black voters are not in the picture. It is just that, he happens to be Black:

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago’s churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. “You have the power to make a United States senator,” he told Emil Jones in 2003. In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war.

0 Comments


On Marx, Neo-colonialism And Awqaf
July 9, 2008, 3:00 pm
Filed under: World Affairs | Tags:

industrial nonprofitability and awqaf

For a combination of reasons - some psychological - the Muslim powers have formed a notion of contemporary capitalism that is fundamentally flawed, in that it takes over a reasonless optimism from Western speculators, regarding the profitability of industrialisation.

There are several revolutionary movements within the Muslim world which have, for reasons of their own, rejected the capitalist assurances of Western advisors, and adopted a more-or-less Leninist view of the likely fate of local industries, but even this view is defective, because it fails to penetrate to the heart of what Marx really said about industrial profit. Instead, the critique they offer focuses on the well-known problems of distribution, notably demand deficiency. This leaves them wide open to the counter-critique, to the effect that boosting demand with hand-outs of fiat money is inflationary.

In reality, however, the marxian analysis of capitalism makes a fundamental distinction between the capitalism of the merchant and that of the industrial entrepreneur. The dynamic of the latter is in the marxian view self-defeating, in that the progressive substitution of machine for labour power - necessitated by competition - gradually undermines the basis of profitability itself, which is exclusively fresh human labour.

This argument is of course extremely difficult to prove. First one must push out of the way the analytical non-concepts promoted by liberal economics, which appear self-explanatory but in fact foreclose all the essential questions. For example, what is meant by “the productivity of labour”? Output per worker, obviously, but the choice of this concept rather than the concept of “the productivity of capital” makes it appear that labour forces must compete among themselves for the honour of producing most product for least wages, while the competition of capitals goes on elsewhere, quietly automating their jobs and thus overcoming their unprofitable idleness with faultless mechanical activity. On the basis of this sort of analysis, each gain in “labour productivity” authorises a further investment in plant, which destroys the very jobs whose “labour productivity” was the source of self-congratulation. This is not a neutral framework of analysis at all.

If instead one looks at “the productivity of capital” one discovers that indubitably, the higher the technological level involved in capital investment, the harder it is to predict any profitable result from making it, once the period of “technological rent”, which occurs while the individual industrialist is more technologically advanced that his competitors, is over. When they all catch up, the industry as a whole is less profitable, and governments must offer more and more incentives to acquire investment in such industries, since they are politically essential. I have in mind here aircraft, giant computers, nuclear reactors, major transport projects, and other state of the art technological feats. We need them, but they just don’t pay. In Marx’s view, this is because the prices that entrepreneurs buy and sell at are not, collectively, random, but are the necessary results of objective laws, one of which is that only fresh “labour-power” - the potential to work, purchased with a wage - is worth more than its cost.

The ultimate consequence of this is that a fully automated industry could run very successfully for an indefinite period, but it would yield no profits. It would merely cover its costs, with precision, but it would never generate a surplus, since only the injection of fresh labour can do that. Thus, in a profit-seeking world, it would become “a white elephant”, which no one but an asset-stripper could be expected to buy.

On this theory, one can see why industrial capital, in extremis, turns to war. For one thing, the customer is a government, able to guarantee payment for giant military plants out of the state treasury, and to some extent out of a predatory stock market which anticipates new imperial gains from a successful war. For another, the effect of war is to destroy the built-up industrial capital base of the country attacked, and often of the attacker too, allowing industrial investment to start all over again with a lower technological level, a higher proportion of human labour to capital goods, and a resultant higher rate of profit.

Why is this dynamic - if it really exists - hidden not only from the capitalists themselves, but also from the apparently objective Muslims? I think there are both logical and historical reasons. First, I want to make it clear that Marx himself is an incredibly over-ambitious writer, constantly spiralling off from the demonstrable and commonsensical fact into sequences of apocalyptic dementia. Second, I want to stress that what I have said - and indeed what Marx himself says - only applies to industrial capitalism, not to mercantile capitalism, on which the glories of Muslim civilisation were founded. It is only industrial capitalism which methodically replaces human labour with machines.

One can to some extent automate the processes on which mercantile capitalism relies, such as goods transport, which can be automated via containerisation, and the resulting long-range falling rate of profit will then begin to manifest itself, upon the ruins of the transport entrepreneurs who have priced one another out of the market by competing in this way. However, the mercantile empire of the Muslims never showed any interest in doing this, and indeed, has never quite found a specific response to the development of industrial capitalism as such. The leaders of the Muslim world remain torn between the liberal ideology of Western business, which they dubiously assume can generate great wealth if freed from neocolonialist unequal exchange, and the marxian ideology of total state control, which is not only tyrannical and irreligious, but unnecessary, once one finally sees that the marxian critique applies only to industrial capital, not to mercantile capital which can be left in private hands with great advantage.

Historically, the current Muslim leaderships are to a great extent impacted by the processes of Western colonialism and neo-colonialism, which for a long time concentrated on reinforcing the “anti-communist” doctrine, to the effect that marxism was in every respect a maniacal creed akin to nazism but based on the idea of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” instead of that of the dictatorship of a “race”. This is unattractive enough, to rulers of largely traditional religious and agricultural societies, but it can be made worse by demonstrating that in fact all the marxian communist regimes, having degenerated through every phase of tyranny, are now extinct or close to it. This fact is supposed to suggest that liberal economists were right all along.

As far as I know, no one has managed to extract from the large and disagreeable body of Marx’s writings his essential arguments about the constant and inevitable fall in the intrinsic rate of profit of all industrial enterprises. Perhaps it is fortunate that I come from a non-Muslim background, and that during my earlier years I spent many unpleasant hours working my way through the three volumes of Das Kapital, so that I could eventually spill the essential contents in a way that conforms to Muslim sensibilities and aspirations instead of to those of the revolutionary stock villains of which our popular literature is so full.

My reasoning is that the “technosphere”, so to speak, the body of industrial enterprises that exists within any given Muslim state, and which is essential to the civilised survival of both state and people, should be regarded as a sort of waqf, or divinely mandated charitable asset. Thus, it can be maintained at cost in its full functionality, and not sold to asset-strippers or demolished by the bombs of competitors who claim it to be an offense against “the free market” (and against Western, judeo-christian, usury-based world power).

I can’t deny that the Western powers would like to strangle any such thing at its birth, or failing that, to bomb it to smithereens. This is why I want to explore the ideological, theoretical, and even moral questions which underlie the so-called “hegemony” of industrial capitalism. I shall steadfastly insist that it is not “capitalism as a whole” that I am analysing, but solely industrial capitalism, which I define as the process of substitution of machine for human labour in production. It is only within this context that the conventional moral arguments about the merit of “working for one’s living” become problematic, since the industrial worker, unlike any other sort of worker, is perpetually working himself out of a job, and often finds himself specifically employed on the task of making other employees redundant - and all this leading to a state in which there are no workers at all, and no profit at all, just gleaming machines standing in unused factories waiting to be purloined by an asset-stripper and sold off cheap to yield a momentary opportunistic profit elsewhere, since at their full cost they cannot yield profit.

Let us imagine that, by means of a waqf type of administration, the basic automated industries that supply the everyday needs of the citizens can be maintained in operation despite yielding no profit. The question will then arise, with what are the citizens to pay for their produce? Some will possess sufficient incomes from other sources to purchase the produce, and some not. We must look at existing waqfs in the Muslim world, at their history, at the moral, political and economic arguments used to explain their methods of functioning, at their limits (for instance, I do not know of any “free food for the masses” waqfs, but I know of plenty of “free water for the animals” waqfs) - and finally at the confused and confusing Western protestant-jewish idea that “there is no such thing as a free lunch”.

There is nothing in the Qur’an to compare with the sheer sadism of the
judeo-christian curse of Adam, found in the book the Catholics call Genesis and the Jews Bereshit :

3:17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

3:18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

3:19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

However, there is an acceptance in general terms of the fact that this world is an arena of struggle (if not a “vale of tears”) and that it is not morally, emotionally, psychologically or physically healthy for mankind to simply loll around eating the fruit off the trees. Rather, mankind is expected to grasp that, just as in childhood one’s parents make considerable real effort to ensure one’s welfare, so in adulthood one should make considerable efforts to ensure one’s own welfare, and the welfare of any family one is blessed enough to have, and not expect “the welfare state” to provide everything automatically.

I leave to the reader the question of whether bringing into existence, and protecting from criticism, a “technosphere” that is nevertheless able to provide e.g. free food and housing for the masses, would be a meritorious piece of work in itself. I think that it would be highly meritorious, and I think that people’s creativity, their “productivity” in a broader sense than the usual, would be enhanced, not destroyed, if they were free from the basic “care for the morrow”.

In order to find the limits that should really be placed on such a project, limits of good taste and decorum as much as limits of basic morality, I propose a detailed study of the history of the waqfs (correctly, awqaf) of the Muslim world - their finance, their purpose, their achievements, and their limits. I would like to be able to indicate the maximum extent to which such awqaf could remove the cares of everyday survival from Muslims, without inhibiting their “capitalist” initiative, and without adopting the (often perceptibly insane) atheist and materialist views of the unfortunate “marxists” on this much vexed topic.

[I do have highest respect of his writings, but when it comes to religion/theology, that is where I stand out. I hope he  does not mind I post his stuff here on my blog.  Please, write your  comment. I like to know your views.  I shall write more when I have more time, Insha'Allah  tomorrow .Thank you. gess]

0 Comments


Tariq Ali: Next Door To War
July 9, 2008, 11:51 am
Filed under: Book Reviews, World Affairs | Tags: ,

[Before I post the whole article, I want to bring this passage in front, where the most interesting stuff are mentioned in the ending:

"There are three interrelated power blocs in Pakistan. Of these the US lobby is the most influential, the most public and the most hated. It is currently running the country. The Saudis, who use a combination of wealth and religion to get their way, are second in the pecking order and less unpopular. The Chinese lobby is virtually invisible, never interferes in internal politics and for that reason is immensely respected, especially within the army; but it is also the least powerful outside military circles. In Cold War times, the interests of the three lobbies coincided. Not now. The War on Terror has changed all that".]

Tariq Ali does not want to write in plain English that the Americans are “running the country”  - literally  everything and control the military.  I am bit surprised why Tariq Ali does not mention A.Q. Khan.

The full text below: (more…)

2 Comments


Who Funds the Progressive Media?
July 8, 2008, 11:14 am
Filed under: World Affairs | Tags:

Originally posted at global research, and it was available on my Google RSS and read it yesterday, but this morning it was gone. I was mainly interested to know who funds The Real News Network, which took the so-called ‘Progressive & Leftist’ media by storm. Here is what Michael Barker wrote followed by my emphasis in red and my comments:

[Quote start] The Real News Network

Founded in 2007, The Real News describes itself as a “non-profit news and documentary network focused on providing independent and uncompromising journalism”. The Real News website proudly claims that they are “member supported and do not accept advertising, government or corporate funding” (emphasis in the original). [19] The site adds, “the Real News will be financed by the economic power of thousands of viewers like you around the world. Just 250,000 people paying $10 a month will make it happen”, and claims there is “NO government funding; NO corporate funding; NO advertising; NO STRINGS”.

The Real News’ mission statement suggests that Real News promotes independent and investigative journalism and is a grassroots effort. It fails to mention, however, that the project was launched with millions of dollars provided by leading US American liberal foundations. There may well have been no strings attached to the seed money, but there is little doubt that the foundations chose to support their project – as opposed to any alternative ones – because the Real News formula suited the foundations’ own philanthropic interests. How much influence the liberal foundations had in determining the makeup of The Real News advisory boards and founding committees will remain unknown until the issue becomes the focus of an in-depth investigative report. An investigation that is unlikely to be forthcoming from The Real News itself.

That said, this article does not aim to cast doubt on the progressive nature of the journalistic output of The Real News. The quality of the content is indisputably high and offers a real alternative to mainstream media. This article does try to draw attention, however, to the fact that The Real News has relied heavily on liberal philanthropists. It also tries to raise the question as to what this reliance means for the future of genuine grassroots initiatives attempting to promote comparable progressive media projects. In order to open the discussion the following sections of this article will briefly chart the launch of The Real News network, and the backgrounds of the people who are associated with the project.

The Real News can be considered the flagship project of a non-profit group that is known as Independent World Television (IWT). From Toronto (Canada), and formed in 2003, IWT was co-founded by Paul Jay and Sharmini Peries. Paul Jay, who is presently the CEO and chair of The Real News is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who was formerly the creator and executive producer of Canadian Broadcasting Centre Newsworld’s debate program counterSpin. On the other hand, Sharmini Peries, who until recently served as the director of policy and development for IWT, is an executive director of the International Freedom of Expression eXchange and the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. These two groups are have close connections to the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for Democracy. [20] The National Endowment for Democracy plays a big role in promoting United States’ foreign interests – which most notably saw them support the 2002 coup that temporarily removed President Hugo Chavez from power. [21] Ironically, Peries presently serves as a foreign policy advisor to President Chavez.

In 2005, Independent World Television received a $100,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to conduct a “feasibility and planning study on an innovative idea to create a news and current affairs TV network funded primarily by viewers”. Two other liberal foundations, the MacArthur Foundation and the Haas Foundation also contributed to this planning study. IWT set out to create what would become The Real News using the services of EchoDitto – a consulting group that has done much work on projects connected to the United States’ Democratic Party. A website was launched on June 15, 2005 (www.IWTnews.com) to build an online community of supporters and donors. The goal of this first phase of IWT’s project was to raise a $7 million start-up budget from individual donors and foundations. By January 2007 IWT had “raised $5 million from several foundations, charitable trusts, individuals and unions, including the Canadian Auto Workers Union, the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation”. [22] Having achieved this level of philanthropic support, IWT was then able to create The Real News website, at first with a limited news service to help get the full journalism project off the ground.

In an interview in early 2007, IWT co-founder Paul Jay said that during their first year of operations The Real News only required a further $4 million in funding from the public, but thereafter, with a full service provided, estimates their annual budget will require around $30 million a year. Obtaining such high levels of funding from the public within such a short space of time will undoubtedly be difficult. Camilo Wilson, one of IWT’s Internet strategy consultants suggested that this goal is too optimistic, noting that IWT will probably have to depend on greater support from liberal foundations in order to reach its long-term goal. [23]

In the following, this article will introduce some of the individuals who have given their support to launching this new media network.

Founded in 2003, the founding committee of the Independent World Television/The Real News consisted of 84 individuals, including Paul Jay as chair. The committee includes well-known progressives such as British member of parliament Tony Benn (UK), host of the popular “Democracy Now!” program Amy Goodman (USA) [This should ring the alarm bells!! Amy Goodman is a propagandist! and a Zionist! A new Chomskean!! Read this article by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad at CounterPunch, June 11, 2008: When AIPAC Went Missing. Read also her pathetic!! attempt to report the situation in Zimbabwe at Black Agenda Report gess] media scholar Robert McChesney (USA), media critic Danny Schechter (USA), literary author Gore Vidal (USA), historian Howard Zinn (USA) [Another Chomskean. gess] and journalist/author Naomi Klein (Canada).[Bingo! Another Chomskean. gess]

Incidentally, Klein has provided a rare critical overview of the Ford Foundations history. In her book, The Shock Doctrine [hypocritical!! gess], she observes that the Ford Foundation was the “leading source of funding for the dissemination of the Chicago School ideology throughout Latin America”. She adds,

“[Ford-funded institutions played a] …central role in the overthrow of Chile’s democracy, and its former students… appl[ied] their US education in a context of shocking brutality. Making matters more complicated for the foundation, this was the second time in just a few years that its protégés had chosen a violent route to power, the first case being the Berkeley Mafia’s meteoric rise to power in Indonesia after Suharto’s bloody [1965-66] coup.” [24]

The Benton Foundation is also well represented on the IWT founding committee, with Gloria Tristani, Charles Benton and Mark Lloyd (former general counsel to the Benton Foundation now a senior fellow at the George Soros-linked Center for American Progress).

However, the IWT’s founding committee also includes some people with less progressive backgrounds such as Salih Booker, current executive director of NED-funded group Global Rights, and former head of the Council on Foreign Relations Africa Studies Program, and former program officer for the Ford Foundation in Eastern and Southern Africa; Kenneth Roth, executive director of the NED-linked Human Rights Watch; Kim Spencer, President of Link TV, and co-founder of the NED-funded Internews; Shauna Sylvester, founder and executive director of the Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society (IMPACS); and Jenny Toomey who until recently was the executive director of the Future of Music Coalition, and now serves as the program officer for Media and Cultural Policy at the Ford Foundation.

Indeed, even radical media critics, like Robert McChesney, work closely with these foundations, as his media reform group, Free Press, has also obtained Ford Foundation monies; while as early as March 1996, McChesney was a panel participant at the “Symposium of The Future of Public Service Media” – an event that was sponsored by both the Benton Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

Given that Ford and Benton Foundations have extensive funding and personal ties in so many projects of progressive social change it is hardly surprising that most of the representatives of IWT’s founding committee also work for non-profit groups and projects that are funded by the Ford Foundation. However, this almost ‘natural’ state of affairs should give us pause.[Quote end]

No wonder the old Chomsky is hiding behind these people.

I am going to post the whole article below (more…)

0 Comments


Cartoon
July 8, 2008, 10:00 am
Filed under: World Affairs, Zionazi | Tags: ,

“The Palestinian’s Burden”. By Malcolm Evans, for the New Zealand Herald

I can understand the Jews demanding, after their experience at Nazi hands, that they should be given some piece of territory somewhere in the world, where they would be masters in their own house and where there would be an asylum for any Jews who, in future might be threatened with a repetition of what the Nazis did.

But, if the Jews had a claim to be given a piece of territory, this should have been done at the expense of the Western nation that had done its worst to exterminate the Jews..

If the creation of a new state of Israel was judged to be a legitimate form of compensation to the surviving Jews, the territory for this state should have been taken from the Europeans, not from the Arabs.

The new Israel should not have been carved out of Arab Palestine; it should have been carved out of Central Europe.

This point seems to me to be simple and obvious. But, once, when I made it in a lecture in a Western country, (not Germany, not Britain), it was received with shouts of laughter.

The people who laughed were not Jews; they were non-Jewish Westerners, and the country was one that has been traditionally opposed to colonialism.

Yet, they laughed because it seemed to them preposterous that a Western nation should be made to pay for its own crimes with its own territory, when the West’s moral debt to the Jews could, so it seemed to these Westerners, be settled by giving the Jews the territory of a non-Western people that committed no crime at all against the Jews.

This laughter shocked me because it revealed to me what seems to me a shocking persistence of the colonialist attitude of mind. A guilty Western people’s territory was to be sacrosanct, because, though guilty, they were Westerners.

An innocent non-Western people’s territory could, it was held, legitimately be given away to the Jews by the victorious Western powers.This amounts to the declaration of the inequality of the Western and the non-Western sections of the human race.

It is a claim that Westerners are privileged, however guilty they may be. It is a denial of those universal human rights that, in truth, are possessed by every man, woman, and child in the world, irrespective of differences in civilization; religion, nationality and race.

– Arnold Toynbee, Two Aspects of the Palestine Question, in Arnold Toynbee, Importance of the Arab World (1962).

Via Lawrence of Cyberia

0 Comments


‘Do you have love in your culture?’
July 8, 2008, 9:22 am
Filed under: World Affairs, Zionazi | Tags: ,

The tale of a Palestinian journalist: Muhammad Omer.

By *Dahr Jamail, Le Monde diplomatique July 2008.

Muhammad Omer and I jointly received the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in London on 16 June (1). Omer is a 24-year-old Palestinian with whom I feel honoured to have shared this award, as I told the audience at the prize-giving ceremony. His work from his Gaza homeland has been a beacon of humanitarian reportage; it is a model of peace, and an attempt at reconciliation with Israel.

But Omer’s journey to London to receive the award was almost impossible. When I heard about the prize, I booked my flight from San Francisco and boarded my plane. By contrast, Omer struggled even to get an exit visa: his home has been crushed by an Israeli bulldozer, and most of his seven siblings have been killed or maimed by the Israeli army of occupation. The veteran journalist John Pilger, who presented our awards, described Omer’s journey: “Getting Muhammad to London to receive his prize was a major diplomatic operation. Israel has a perfidious control over Gaza’s borders, and he was only allowed out with a Dutch embassy escort.”

Then, after the ceremony, there were our even more different return journeys. My biggest problem was an hour’s delay for the flight back to my home country, the United States, which last year gave Israel $2.38bn in military aid, and will give that amount in the coming fiscal year, along with an extra $150m. (By July 2006 direct US aid to Israel had reached $108bn according to conservative estimates.)

On his return home, Omer was badly beaten up and physically and psychologically abused by Israel’s security forces, Shin Bet. At the Allenby Bridge crossing, from Jordan to the West Bank, he was met by the Dutch official who was to ferry him back into Gaza. The official waited outside as Omer entered the Israeli building. Omer was told to turn off his mobile phone and remove the battery. When he asked if he could call his embassy escort, he was told sternly he was not allowed. A Shin Bet officer searched his luggage and rifled through his documents. “Where’s the money?” he asked Omer. “Where are the English pounds you have?” They wanted to confiscate his prize money, which Omer was wise enough not to carry on his person.

Omer was surrounded by eight armed Shin Bet officers. This is how he described what happened next. “A man called Avi ordered me to take off my clothes. I had already been through an x-ray machine. I stripped down to my underwear and was told to take off everything. When I refused, Avi put his hand on his gun. I began to cry: ‘Why are you treating me this way? I am a human being.’ He said: ‘This is nothing compared with what you will see now.’ He took his gun out, pressing it to my head, and with his full body weight pinning me on my side, he forcibly removed my underwear. He then made me do a concocted sort of dance. Another man, who was laughing, said: ‘Why are you bringing perfumes?’ I replied: ‘They are gifts for the people I love.’ He said: ‘Oh, do you have love in your culture?’

“I had now been without food and water and the toilet for 12 hours and, having been made to stand, my legs buckled. I vomited and passed out. All I remember is one of them gouging, scraping and clawing with his nails at the tender flesh beneath my eyes. He scooped my head and dug his fingers in near the auditory nerves between my head and eardrum. The pain became sharper as he dug in two fingers at a time. Another man had his combat boot on my neck, pressing it into the hard floor. I lay there for over an hour. The room became a menagerie of pain, sound and terror.”

‘Moderate physical pressure’

The Israeli Supreme Court has allowed the use of “moderate physical pressure” in the questioning of prisoners. Israel holds more than 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, many of them under administrative detention (no charges filed, detention can be renewed every six months).

The fourth Geneva Convention (GC) (1949) states: (1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria. To this end, the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons: (a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture (c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”

The Israeli military regularly bombs and uses snipers to attack Palestinian ambulances. Article 20 of the 1949 GC states: “Persons regularly and solely engaged in the operation and administration of civilian hospitals, including the personnel engaged in the search for, removal and transporting of and caring for wounded and sick civilians, the infirm and maternity cases shall be respected and protected.”

Israel has blockaded Gaza, isolating and starving the 1.5 million Palestinians who live there. In 2006 Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

Article 23 of the 1949 GC states: “Each High Contracting Party shall allow the free passage of all consignments of medical and hospital stores and objects necessary for religious worship intended only for civilians of another High Contracting Party, even if the latter is its adversary. It shall likewise permit the free passage of all consignments of essential foodstuffs, clothing and tonics intended for children under 15, expectant mothers and maternity cases.”

The Israeli government has threatened to close orphanages for Palestinian children in Hebron, which would be another violation of international law, for article 24 of the Geneva Convention states clearly: “The Parties to the conflict shall take the necessary measures to ensure that children under fifteen, who are orphaned or are separated from their families as a result of the war, are not left to their own resources, and that their maintenance, the exercise of their religion and their education are facilitated in all circumstances. Their education shall, as far as possible, be entrusted to persons of a similar cultural tradition.”

The Shin Bet violated many GC principles in the way it treated Omer. Part III of the 1949 GC, which covers the status and treatment of protected persons, section I, article 27, says: “Protected persons are entitled, in all circumstances, to respect for their persons, their honour, their family rights, their religious convictions and practices, and their manners and customs. They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof and against insults and public curiosity.” Article 29 of the same section states: “The Party to the conflict in whose hands protected persons may be, is responsible for the treatment accorded to them by its agents, irrespective of any individual responsibility which may be incurred.”

The gross imbalance of power Israel enjoys, thanks to US support, makes these atrocities possible. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. According to Alison Weir, the executive director of If Americans Knew, Palestinians receive 1/23rd of the amount of aid the US provides to Israel.

According to Defence for Children International, Israel has “engaged in gross violations of international human rights and humanitarian law”. Between 1967 and 2003, Israel destroyed over 10,000 Palestinian homes, and that continues.

Attacking journalists is not new. On 16 April Fadel Shanaa, a Palestinian cameraman working for the news agency Reuters, was killed by a rocket fired during an Israeli military incursion into the Gaza Strip. His assistant, Wafa Barbakh, was seriously injured. Both were in vehicle clearly marked “Press”. This appears to be part of systematic targeting of journalists by the Israeli military. Since the beginning of the second intifada in September 2000, the Israeli military has killed at least nine journalists, including an Italian and a Briton. At least 170 other journalists have been wounded by the Israeli military during this period.

Former Dutch ambassador Jan Wijenberg said of what happened to Omer: “This is by no means an isolated incident, but part of a long-term strategy to demolish Palestinian social, economic and cultural life… I am aware of the possibility that Mohammed Omer might be murdered by Israeli snipers or bomb attack in the near future. . . [Omer] is a moderating voice, urging Palestinian youth not to court hatred but seek peace with Israel.” Janet McMahon, managing editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, for which Omer writes, says he is still in hospital. “He may go home, or have an operation. He’s still in a lot of pain, and it’s hard for him to swallow, or to breathe deeply. He’s being fed intravenously.”

I cannot reconcile the disparity in our experiences. How can we reconcile something that is irreconcilable in the absence of all justice?

*Dahr Jamail wrote Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2007, after eight months in Iraq as an independent journalist. He also covered the 2006 war in Lebanon

(1) Dahr Jamail’s award was for his work on Iraq. See “US presidents-to-be in denial”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, May 2008.

0 Comments


Cartoon
July 7, 2008, 3:43 pm
Filed under: World Affairs | Tags:

(Click to enlarge. Via here.

1 Comment


Some Wise Words: Mandela, Mugabe & The People Of Zimbabwe
July 7, 2008, 2:17 pm
Filed under: Black Studies, Myths Debunked, World Affairs | Tags: , ,

Mandela


Thousands of people were killed by the forces of Apartheid. Mandela was just one of them who was picked up and imprisoned. Unlike Steve Biko and many others Mandela was not killed while imprisoned. Maybe the Apartheid boys saw something in him they could use if and when necessary. And they were right.

Mandela was much more angry with his wife for not being completely faithful during 27 years of imprisonment than he ever was with those who imprisoned him and robbed him of his freedom. And that’s exactly what they saw in him: a man who deep down adored his oppressors and only wanted to be their equal and live with them despite their inhuman criminality and wickedness. And that’s why he is liked by whites–because they see a man who feels so inferior that he would excuse anything an European does.

Why the big birthday party in London and not in South Africa? And why hardly any African faces in the big crowd watching some black and white faces sing and dance for him?

Mugabe

Mugabe himself was imprisoned for many years by the white settlers in Zimbabwe but I think that the years spent in Ghana during the days of Nkrumah helped him retain a portion of his African self-consciousness. Mugabe also nurses a serious grudge against the British for the callous way he was treated at the death of his very young son.

Sure, under normal circumstances Mugabe has overstayed his time as President of Zimbabwe, but circumstances were/are not normal. He is the only one I see who could have handled the tricks played by the British government as it maneuvered to ensure that the settlers did not give up their stolen lands–as in Nambibia, South Africa and Kenya. Another leader would just have sold out–after all that massaging by the British: knighthood, honorary doctorates, state dinner at Buckingham Palace, etc.

All that Mugabe had to do was to be a craven negro stooge and he would have been home safe. Who would have heard of Mugabe if he had just let the whites stay with their stolen booty–lording it over Africans treated like slaves on their own lands, working for just slave wages on those white farms?

Zimbabwe was offered independence in 1980 and the land issue dragged on until 2002 when Mugabe and the war veterans said “enough is enough” then proceeded to seize back the stolen lands. And ever since that time the whole world-wide white kith and kin collective has been going ballistic over Mugabe. All I can say is that given the amount of rage and anger it has to be a very special experience to be a person of European extraction in this world. I just cannot understand their rage and anger. To say it’s just racism, doesn’t really answer the question. It must be a special kind of racism having to do with a very complex set of issues.

The People of Zimbabwe

There is something strange about the people those parts of Africa where the Europeans first killed thousands of people then seized their lands. One thing that is noteworthy is that they never seem to wear African clothing–African parlimentarians who attempted to wear Africa clothing were chided and there was a law in Kenya forbidding African clothing to be worn in Parliament– and they seem to be completely taken in by Christianity.

I write the above to say that the massive sanctions placed on the economy of Zimbabwe had the desired effect. Unlike the Iraqis who experienced death dealing sanctions from the West and the Palestinians a large section of the people of urban Zimbabwe just fell for the white-led and financed MDC. It’s as if they didn’t understand the implications of what they were doing. Sure, if you want to oppose ZANU then form political parties by all means, but why choose to support the party funded and promoted by the settlers and their backers in the West? And that’s why I think that the hard-core ZANU supporters saw that voting for Tsvangirai was pure treachery.

– Words by a respected anonymous

0 Comments


James Petras: President Chavez and the FARC: State and Revolution
July 4, 2008, 10:13 am
Filed under: World Affairs | Tags:

James Petras raised an important question:

Why then do radical leaders who themselves led armed struggles, once in office, call on their revolutionary counterparts to abandon guerrilla warfare and engage in electoral processes which have such dubious prospects?

Full text.

I do agree with the moral explanation, but another factor which Petras is afraid to admit is the race issue. Latin America was under European rule for centuries, and the turning of 20th century, the majority of population in Brazil were Blacks and the neighbouring countries had also predominantly Black population. Then came European immigrants which was part of a policy to halt the demographic curve. The Blacks have no access when it comes to being part of the elites and decision makers, and all of these countries are governed with same principle as Europeans; very little upward movement in social ladder, even today in socialist Cuba, but where as in Haiti gets punishment for its unilateralism.

The various revolutions in Latin America in last century is an European affair and staged by and relates to European descendants — imported ideologies from Europe, and you can say FARC’s death can be compared to the fall of the Berlin wall 1989.

Here is a good background text by Nikolas Kozloff on Afro-Colombians.

The Indigenous people are not better of than Afro-Latin Americans, and it will be interesting to follow how the relationship between Evo Morales and Chavez will develop in the future.

1 Comment

previous »